Saturday, August 27, 2016

A ring believed to have belonged to Joan of Arc has gone on display in France after its new owners made an appeal to the Queen to keep it out of the hands of its historic rival across the Channel.

French historical theme park Le Puy du Fou bought the 15th-century gold-plated silver ring at auction in London in February for £300,000 but was told after it had arrived in France that it had not obtained the necessary export licence for a historical artefact.

Arts Council England, which oversees the export regulations, said the ring should be returned to Britain.

Puy du Fou president Nicolas de Villiers, whose father Philippe, a French politician, founded the theme park, said there had never been any question of returning the ring.

Saturday, August 13, 2016

The determination of the Greek mother is, perhaps, best exemplified in the story of Pherenike, a proud ancient version of the modern-day soccer mom, who watched her children grow into strong athletes— all the way to Olympic glory.

Against all of the rules that barred women from participating in any way, shape or form during the Olympics, she became her son’s trainer and took him all the way to the 94th Olympiad of 404 BC where she donned a male trainer’s tunic and disguised her face to look more manly.

She risked her own life while doing this as women caught at or even near Olympia during the sacred rituals and athletic competitions, were thrown off the top of a hill and into a river to their deaths.

In his boxing match, Peisirodos did his family proud, and won Olympic laurels— the ancient equivalent to a Gold Medal. Pherenike was ecstatic and lost in the excitement of the moment, leapt into the ring to congratulate her son.

An archaeologist whose research was ignored because she was a woman is being honoured in a new project set up to rediscover one of her key finds.

Christian Maclagan investigated the remains of an Iron Age roundhouse in her home town of Stirling in the 1870s. Attitudes towards women at the time meant her academic paper on the broch structure was only accepted after it was transcribed by a man.

A small team of enthusiasts plan to search for the 2,000-year-old house They have dubbed their project as a search for "the broch sexism lost".

Since Maclagan's discovery of the Livilands broch the site is thought to have been buried during the landscaping of a garden in Wester Livilands in Stirling. There is also an Easter Livilands in Stirling, but the other location is thought to be the most likely site of the lost ruins.

Much like their modern counterpart, the Olympic Games in ancient Greece wasn't exactly a level playing field for women. It's true that women of all ages were allowed to enjoy the festivities and exhilarating athletic events in cities throughout the Peloponnese states, including Delos and Athens. But the Games in Olympia in the land of Elis—the city where the Olympics originated—retained its traditional, sacred ban of women. Elis decreed that if a married woman (unmarried women could watch) was caught present at the Olympic Games she would be cast down from Mount Typaeum and into the river flowing below, according to Greek geographer and travel writer Pausanias.

During these ancient times, women lived much shorter lives, were excluded from political decision-making and religious rites, and were forced into early marriages after giving birth to several children. Despite the societal inequalities and oppression, women in Greece wanted to play—so they started their own Olympics called the Heraean Games.

“Every fourth year,” Pausanias wrote in 175 A.D., “there is woven for Hera a robe by the Sixteen women, and the same also hold games called Heraea.”

Almost 50 years ago, archaeologists excavating an ancient city just outside of St. Louis discovered a mass burial site with an unusual central feature – two bodies arranged atop a bed of beads, with several other bodies encircling them.

It was once thought that the elaborate ‘beaded burial’ structure at Cahokia was built as a monument to male power – but now, researchers suggest this is not the case.

A new analysis of the remains reveals that one of these central bodies is actually female, and researchers say the discovery of similar male-female pairs and the remains of a child indicates that women played an important role in society.

In the new study, published to the journal American Antiquity, researchers with the Illinois State Archaeological Survey at the University of Illinois and colleagues found that there are both male and female remains buried at the site of the Native American city, Cahokia.

Cahokia is said to be North America's first city, and is the largest pre-Columbian settlement north of Mexico.

Sunday, August 7, 2016

Julian Richards returns to one of the most intriguing cases featured over a decade ago in the BBC’s Meet the Ancestorsarchaeology series, and discovers that this ancestor has a more remarkable background than he imagined.

This article was first published in the April 2012 issue of BBC History Magazine.

One of the most absorbing of those original discoveries was the so-called ‘Roman princess’ who emerged from an excavation at Spitalfields in the east end of London in 1999. The Museum of London archaeology team was digging a huge medieval cemetery that had grown up around the monastic hospital that gave its name to this part of London. But as well as thousands of medieval burials there were also some of Roman date.